Tag Archive | Antiques Road Trip

A Chinese insect and spider plate

Oct29

A recently repeated episode of the BBC’s Antiques Road Trip (series 20, episode 25, first broadcast on 7 February 2020) featured a glazed Chinese dish, featuring insects such as bees, dragonflies, spiders, beetles and crickets/grasshoppers, as well as a large central wasp spider. It was bought by Natasha Raskin Sharp from an antiques shop in Newark-on-Trent for £50 (haggled down from the ticket price of £69). It caught my eye too: if I’d seen it in an antiques shop, I’d definitely have bought it.

I couldn’t tell from the views shown if it was a transfer decoration that had then been hand-coloured, or if it was entirely hand-painted.

Natasha thought it was likely to date from the 1960s. It had a stamp on the back with Chinese characters.

Glazed Chinese dish / plate with hand-coloured insects and spiders, featured on the Antiques Road Trip.

 

The dish generated a lot of interest at the auction at Willingham Auctions, of Willingham, Cambridgeshire, and sold for £190.

A quick bit of google-fu and I found the dish had sold as Lot 1236 at the Antique and Good Quality Modern and Collectables auction held on 19 October 2019, and that the auction house had described the dish as ‘Entomology interest – Unusual Chinese glazed earthenware plate of canted square form, the hand-finished decoration comprising a large, central female wasp spider in its web surrounded by a variety of other insects, including a locust, hornet, beetles and other arachnids, the base with orange seal mark.’

I’d love to know a bit more about this dish, especially its age and who made it. I wonder if it is older than Natasha thought? The auction house made no mention of its presumed date. It feels late nineteenth century to me, but I know diddly squat about Chinese ceramics. Does anyone out there have any knowledge of this intriguing dish? If so, I’d love to hear.

H Dipper of Labuan

Apr18

My maternal grandparents lived and worked in what was then British North Borneo (now Sabah, a state in Malaysia) from 1919 to 1951, apart from home leave periods, and three and a half years spent in various internment camps in Borneo under the cruel keep of the Japanese during World War 2. My mother and her brother were born there in the early 30s, and I have been researching colonial life in British Borneo for quite a few years now. (One day I hope to publish a book about it. One day …)

The carpentry box belonging to H Dipper of Labuan, British North Borneo.

I watch Antiques Road Trip every now and then, and in a recently-aired episode I was interested to see a large wooden chest filled with carpenter’s tools. The name of the owner, H Dipper, was clearly written on the side; the first part of his address was a little less clear but I could just make out ‘LABUAN’ and below it ‘B. NORTH BORNEO’ (for British North Borneo); to the right of this was other script that had been rubbed out and so was pretty much illegible, though I could make out ‘BORNEO’ again. British North Borneo (first ruled by a Chartered Company and then post-war as a Crown Colony) ceased to be on 16 September 1963 with the formation of the independent Federation of Malaysia, after which time it was (and still is) known as Sabah. So that gives me a terminus ante quem for the date of this box and H Dipper’s sojourn on Labuan, a small island (and now a Federal Territory of Malaysia) off the south-west coast of Sabah.

I am curious to find out more about H Dipper and his life on Labuan. Were his tools part of his work? Maybe he worked for the PWD (Public Works Department)? Or was woodworking his hobby? Maybe the tools were added later and are nothing to do with the life of the box in Borneo. If anyone knows anything about H Dipper (I’m pretty confident in assuming he is a he) I would love to hear from you. You can leave a message in the comments field below.

The box was bought by Charles Hanson in Williton in Somerset for £55 and sold at an auction held by Lawrences of Crewkerne, Somerset for an impressive £220. The programme (Series 5, Episode 6) was first broadcast in October 2012, and I think was probably filmed in the spring of that year.

A little postscript: I do know at least that H Dipper was not one of the civilian internees held at Batu Lintang camp outside Kuching in Sarawak, Borneo, the camp where most of the civilians from British Borneo were held by the Japanese during WW2.